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Peggy Appiah, 84, Author Who Bridged Two Cultures, Dies

Peggy Appiah, who as a daughter of a British chancellor of the exchequer defied the conventions of her time by marrying an Ashanti political leader and who went on to become an author and a revered figure in her adopted homeland, Ghana, died Saturday in Kumasi, Ghana. She was 84.

The cause was a heart attack at Akomfo Anokye Hospital, according to her son, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Reared in upper-crust Britain, the youngest of four children of Sir Stafford Cripps, a Labor party leader and cabinet officer in the Clement Attlee government (1945-51), Peggy Cripps caused an international sensation when she announced plans to marry in July 1953. Her fiancé was Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, who was in London as a law student and representative of Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast, the British colony that became Ghana in 1957.

Nkrumah was Ghana's first president, and Mr. Appiah was a close associate and his choice for vice president, until political differences led Nkrumah to imprison him several times.

The Appiahs are said to have been the inspiration, along with another African-British couple, Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, for the 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," which dealt with a California couple's reaction to their daughter's engagement to a black doctor.

That view was lent support by Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard, and a friend of Mr. Appiah's since their student days, who noted that it was a marriage of equals at the highest levels of their societies.

"She was to the manner born and he was an aristocrat related to the king of the Ashanti," Mr. Gates said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "He was the John Adams of his country; its founding father with Kwame Nkrumah."

The couple met at a gathering of the West African Students Union, of which Mr. Appiah was president. From the start, Miss Cripps made it clear that she would not be intimidated by the firestorm of criticism the couple endured.

"If we experience any difficulties in mixing with Europeans, I shall throw in my lot with the colored people," she told The Sunday Express of London.

The marriage came to symbolize far more than the union of two individuals. Richard Weight, a British historian who is making a documentary about interracial marriage, said: "For a lot of people, it drew the line between those who thought Britain had an integrated postcolonial future and those who didn't. And it became an international story with particular resonance because it involved the daughter of a former chancellor."

Born in 1921, Enid Margaret Cripps, who used the name Peggy, was the youngest of four children of Sir Stafford and Lady Isobel Swithenbank Cripps. On her father's side she could trace her lineage back to William the Conqueror. She was reared at a rambling country house, Goodfellows, and spent much of World War II in Moscow, where her father served as ambassador. After the war, she went to Iran, where she worked for the British Army, which ran the railways.

She is survived by her son, the Laurance Rockefeller professor of philosophy at Princeton, who lives in Manhattan and Princeton, N.J., and three daughters, Isabel Endresen, an economist, of Windhoek, Namibia, Adwo Edun, a landscape gardener, of Lagos, Nigeria, and Abena Appiah of Kumasi; and eight grandchildren. Settling in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti people, shortly after her wedding, she shunned the traditional British -- and Ghanaian-- role of homemaker, even as she reared her children, served as helpmate to her husband, kept the family going when he was in prison and established several philanthropies.

"At one time there was an effort to deport her," said Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker, who is Professor Appiah's companion. "She said the airport was a long way away and she would kick and scream every inch of the way. Fearful of the publicity that would engender, they backed down."

Known to many in Ghana as Auntie Peggy, Mrs. Appiah was a prolific writer of children's books, many of them based on the Ghanaian folk tales her husband told their children, as well as of novels, poetry and most recently a collection of 7,000 Ashanti proverbs, on which she collaborated with her son.

The book, published in English and Ashanti, had its origins in her collection of gold weights.

"She collected weights used for weighing gold but made of brass," Professor Appiah said. "Many of them had figurative art that came from proverbs. When a dealer came to the house, she would ask, 'What is the proverb?' and if he didn't know, she would eventually travel to the village to find out."

Though she had a house in Brighton, England, Mrs. Appiah considered Ghana her home.

"When my father died 15 years ago, people asked her, 'When are you going home?' " her son said. "She kept saying, 'I am home.' Finally she bought herself a plot of ground to be buried in, so when people said, 'When are you going home?,' she could answer: 'I am not going home. I have my burial plot here.' "